October 31, 2004:

A few odd lots in between doorbell ringsI
hope the kids start turning out in large numbers soon, or tomorrow I will
be eating way too many Hershey Kisses...

Researchers at Rutgers University have some strong evidence that people
who don't like bitter vegetables (in other words, the only ones the
vegnazis consider "true" vegetables) are thinner and healthier
than people who do. It's unclear why, but "supertasters" who
are highly sensitive to bitter tastes eat less fat specifically, and
less food generally, than those who are less sensitive to bitter tastes.
Neither Carol nor I much care for broccoli and brussels sprouts, and
now we can fight back. Here's
the story. Take that, you chubby Vegans!

Bruce Baker sent me a
link to the story of Joseph J. Foss, a WWII hero who was hassled
in a major way by the slobbering morons at TSA who refused to let him
board a plane at Phoenix Sky Harbor because they were suspicious of
his Congressional Medal of Honor. They didn't even know what it was.
Foss was on his way to address the cadets at West Point, and didn't
feel like leaving his medal in his luggage. We can't frisk more than
two Muslims per flightbut we can harass an American war hero without
limit or apology. I think a 10-year jail sentence for the head of TSA,
plus bankrupting fines for the top ten people beneath him would be about
right. Fussing over a spoke wrench is merely stupid. Fussing over the
Congressional Medal of Honor is utterly criminal.

I'm finding some interesting things by scanning the search terms people
have used to find my site. Someone searched for "dr. scholls nanotech
foot powder" and my site was a false positive (the #2 hit, in fact)
but in checking it out I learned that Nanophase Technologies is selling
nanoscale zinc oxide crystals in bulk, for use in transparent sunblock
(no more white noses!) and antifungal foot powder. Some other search
terms were intriguing (like "who has had sex with jeff rankin")
but mostly in terms of seeing why my site was a search hitor pondering
why someone would assume that the question "who has had sex with
jeff rankin" would have an answer on the Web.

My other two favorite search terms for the month of October are "i/o
exception occurred connection refused i hate you" and "why
cat's pee glows in the dark". (Does it?) Runner up is "wmp54g
pile of shit". Yea verily, the universe is far stranger than
we can imagine!

October 30, 2004:

I just got back home from Phoenix, to discover
that my last living aunt, Josephine Pryes Dubin, had died very late last
night, at 86. Aunt Josephine was my mother's favorite sister. The two
of them were best friends for most of their lives, and we visited her
down in Blue Island on a pretty regular basis. I stayed with her and her
family for ten days when my sister was born, and remember having a great
time with her kids Rosalie and Ron. She was many things my mother was
not: Glamorous, aggressive, energetic, and completely fearless, and while
sometimes those qualities drove my mother to distraction, they always
remained solid friends and confidants. After my father died, the two of
them took a driving trip around the Southwest to visit all the great mission
churches and other sacred sites that they had heard of, all the while
talking endlessly of buying land and retiring in Arizona, something everybody
in the family talked about and no one ever did. (I was the only one in
the family who ever actually lived there, and retirement was never in
the picture.)

I got the word from my cousin Ron, in a simple email that mentioned his
mother's passing, followed by the statement that "Now the family is
all together again." It was a very big family, close, rowdy, and full
of life and legend. Phyllis, the eldest child of ten, died as a young woman
in 1930, and supposedly kept a close eye on her siblings thereafter, providing
warnings and visions and comfort as required. Louie was my black-sheep Yankee
tinkerer uncle, and Joey my godfather. Two of the older girls died as children;
Louise as a toddler and Stella as an infant. The rest may be seen in the
only family photo ever taken, circa 1927, in my May
11, 2003 entry. Phyllis, Stella, Louise, John, Anna, Joey, Louie, Josephine,
Benjamin, and Victoria are finally reunitedand damn, I miss 'em all.

October 27, 2004:

I'm in Phoenix for a few days, for our quarterly
Paraglyph meeting and a speech tomorrow at the Arizona Book Pubishing
Association. The flight was horrible; we all got shaken like a paint mixer
the last 25 minutes into Phoenix Sky Harbor, and I've been nauseous ever
since we touched down, which was almost eight hours ago. Ugggh.

More irritating, however, was the display of what Bruce Schneier calls
"security theater" at the Colorado Springs airport. I know,
we're a week before the election (hurry and let it be over!) and so I
was expecting them to be acting up, but this one surprised me. I put my
briefcase, coat, shoes, and laptop in the plastic buckets and laid them
on the belt, and dumped my pockets into a bowl. The guy who met me at
the other side of the metal detector held my keychain up and asked me
what a certain item on the keychain was. It was a stamped steel spoke
wrench that the bike shop guys gave me when they refurbed my 10-speed
way back in 1985. It's been on my keychain ever since, for no good reason,
and I've never had to use it. I told him it was a spoke wrench.

"You mean, it's a tool?"

"Yes, it's a tool. For adjusting bike spokes."

"You can't take a tool on board."

I don't argue with those guys. It doesn't help, and just annoys the next
people in line, like the woman air force officer behind me who looked
like she'd really like to get her shoes back. The guy holding my
keychain told me I could go back to the check-in desk and check the wrench
through in baggage. This would also mean I'd have to put my shoes back
on, traipse the quarter mile back to America West's baggage check-in,
then come back through the security line and do the whole ridiculous exercise
again. No way. I told him to dump it.

The wrench was nothing but a flat piece of 3/32" steel about 2 1/2
inches long, with a wrench notch at one end and a hole punched in the
other. It had never had sharp edges, and banging on my keys for 20 years
had softened what little edge it might have originally carried. Hell,
my house key has a sharper edge and more of a point.

But note what's going on here: The guy didn't know what it was. I could
have told him it was a tribal totem or a good luck charm from my deceased
Uncle Louie, and that might have allowed it to pass muster. But once I
named it as a tool, that made it dangerous. This is magical thinking,
almost like the old cargo cults, where a model of an airstrip is created
to attract aircraft and their marvelous cargo. The whole exercise is intended
to give the security moms something to vote Republican for next week.
It has nothing to do with keeping Muslim terrorists from getting on a
plane, which is made more difficult by court rulings forbidding airport
security from targeting more than one or two middle-eastern looking people
for extra scrutiny on a single flight.

So the line is delayed, my spoke wrench is gone, and Abdul sails through
security because his two buddies have already been wanded. We are way
down the security rabbit hole here, and I don't see anything in our democratic
process that will put it right.

October 26, 2004:

I'm reading a nice old book called The Great
Iron Ship by James Dugan, a noted historian of maritime issues, especially
ships. The iron ship in question is the Great Eastern, an ill-fated
700-foot monster launched in 1859, and was in its time the largest and
most cutting-edge steamship ever attempted.

Although I only wanted a pleasantly dull history book to help put me
to sleep at the end of long evenings, I found a fine yarn, and stumbled
on some amazing parallels to the Internet excesses of the 1990s. The Great
Eastern was the brainchild of the wonderfully named Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
perhaps the most brilliant mechanical/civil engineer of the Victorian
era. After building hundreds of bridges, tunnels, ships, and railroads
(and losing the rail standards war between five foot gauge and the more
technically sensible seven foot gauge) Brunel wanted a triumph. He felt
he could design and build the largest steamship in history, and so, by
the sheer force of his personality and his reputation, formed a company,
gathered investors, and (in 1855) started to work.

He didn't have a business plan. He figured that if he built a wonder,
he would make money and even get rich, simply because there had never
been a ship like that before. The design itself was bleeding edge for
the time; brilliant, but in many ways beyond the reach of contemporary
shipbuilding. The company burned through money at a furious rate, and
ultimately the project went bankrupt three times while the monster slowly
rose over the Isle of Dogs along the Thames in London. Each time Brunel
raised more capital from investors, and each time the capital was insufficient.
When the ship was launched, it was still grossly incomplete, and for its
maiden voyage to New York in July 1860, only a hundred staterooms had
been completed, out of 3000 planned. Brunel had no established steamship
company behind him, had no experience in running a steamship company,
and was too arrogant to hire the experience he lacked. So it was one blunder
after another, amidst unending cost overruns and disasters, including
an explosion that killed several crew, and a freak accident that drowned
the captain.

Brunel basically built the ship because he knew it could be built (barely)
and because it could be built it had to be built, and economics
be damned. (Boy, does that sound familiar or what?) Brunel was a modern
in other ways as well. As Dugan points out:

Brunel had a generous scientific
philosophy. He did not believe in patenting inventions, and protected
none of his numerous ideas, saying, "Most good things are thought
of by many persons at the same time. If there were publicity and freedom
of communication, instead of concealment and mystery, a hundred times
as many useful ideas would be generated."

I can't help but think he'd be on the Linux kernel team had he survived
to the 1990s. Alas, the ship's failure as an economic goldmine ruined
Brunel's health, and he died of a stroke at age 53, just a few months
after the Great Eastern had launched. The ship's sole triumph was
technical: It was the only vessel large enough to carry sufficient cable
to lay a single length from Europe to North America, and laid the first
unspliced cable from England to Newfoundland in 1866.

Apart from its short stint as a cableship, the Great Eastern had
a troubled run, gathering disasters and ill-will like mud on a farmer's
boots. It was too big to dock at most ports, never made much money, and
ended its life as a sort of floating casino and showboat before being
broken up for scrap in 1889. While the hull was being taken down, the
skeletal remains of a riveting team of a riveter and his boy assistant
(child labor was a commonplace in shipbuilding then) were found sealed
in a compartment between the hulls. Many assumed that the ship had been
cursed by their restless ghosts, but in truth, it was just the craziness
that comes of a grand idea with no grounding in the time, place, and circumstances
in which it was conceived.

Copies of The Great Iron Ship can be had from the used book services
online for as little as $2, and I recommend it. For those whose curiosity
isn't book-length, here's a
nice summary. And another.

October 25, 2004:

I
just finished the Firefly
4-DVD set, containing the entire TV series, including three episodes
that the knucklehead Fox network didn't air. In addition to slotting the
show at the worst possible time and hour, Fox scrambled up the episodes,
which were written within a broad story arc that rendered certain things
incomprehensible when seen out of order. Well, for $34.95 you can have
on it on your vid shelf, and see the whole series, in order, as God and
Joss Whedon intended it to be seen. (See my previous discussions of the
show in my September
21, 2002, October
26, 2002, and December
20, 2002 entries.)

Note well that we are talking superlatives here: Firefly is quite
clearly the finest TV SF ever created. Period. No anti-intellectual Trek
science doubletalk. No hokey rubberfaced aliens, or pretty girls with
a splotch of rubber crap on their cheeks to suggest that they would be
aliens if the demographic didn't prefer pretty girls. No improbably compact
ray guns that make poor Red neatly and completely vanish when shot. No
San Francisco liberal Star Trek interstellar nanny state gently trying
to keep the rowdy Klingons in line when a few nova bombs on their home
planet would solve the problem. Nope, in the Firefly universe,
government is not the solution. Government is the problem. (And
I don't think it's a coincidence that the characters refer to the totalitarian
Federation as "the Feds.") This is red-state SF, with real men,
real women, real guns, real fistfights, real horses, real stories, decent
acting, and Jewel Staite, the most beautiful woman ever to work in TV.

In other words, gang, if you haven't seen this, you are fersure ripping
yourselves off. Nothing like it anywhere, and its flaws are way outnumbered
by its triumphs. We're all counting the days until the
Firefly feature film launches on April 22, 2005. In the meantime,
buy the set and see 'em all!

October 24, 2004:

Relevant to my entry for October
21, 2004, Jim Mischel pointed out that we're soon going to see a sort
of lab experiment on the demographic consequences of polygamy, just without
the polygamy. China
has been enforcing a one-child-per-family rule for 25 years, and since
boys are valued more than girls in almost all human societies, the country
has seen untold millions of baby girls either aborted or shipped out of
the country to adoptive parents. Estimates are that in the under-25 age
cohort, there is a 15% - 25% excess of males over females. Most of these
excess males are still boys or teens, but over the next thirty years we'll
see something we've probably never seen before: A major world power including
among its citizens untold millions of men with little or no hope of ever
having wives and families.

It's anybody's guess what effects this will have, but I think it's fair
to assume that none of them will be good.

October 23, 2004:

After months of talking about it too much (and
being ribbed by my friends here for talking about it too much) earlier
this evening Carol and I finally held the first instance of what we hope
is our semiregular nerd party here. We started this tradition in 1987
in California, when I still worked for Borland, and continued the parties
on a monthly basis after I got laid off. Once we moved to Arizona in 1990,
we started it up again, and continued off and on until I shuttered Visual
Developer Magazine in early 2000.

So it was good to get back into the groove, and we got a really auspicious
start, with 15 people in attendance. The conversation veritably boiled
with topics ranging from Beowulf clustering to mil-spec mirror coatings.
Carol and I made a huge cauldron of our eventually-to-be-famous lowfat
Buffalo-Zin Chili, using front-range ground bison and zinfandel wine.

We had a great time. About 8 PM, the doorbell rang, and Carol and I both
ran for it, thinking it was one of our guests. Not so: We were greeted
by a group of five or six young teen girls (who might have been 14 or
15 at most) on a scavenger hunt. What did they ask for? A toupee and a
pair of thong panties. Yes, I'm bald, and yes, Carol is stylish, but,
yeek! I can just imagine, 35 years ago, trucking down the street and asking
the poor Linksweilers (a childless couple in their 50s who lived on our
block) for a wig and some underwear.

The world has indeed changed.

October 21, 2004:

In the wake of all the fury surrounding the
gay marriage issue, few have noticed something else percolating to the
top of the family law stack: A challenge before the Supreme Court to Reynolds
vs.United States, the 1878 Supreme Court decision upholding an 1862 federal
law criminalizing polygamy. Several publications, including USA Today
and the Wall Street Journal, have recently commented on this, with
USA Today publishing a
piece by Jonathan Turley, arguing that polygamy is generally a religious
issue, and banning it represents an unconstitutional violation of the
First Amendment's promise of the free exercise of religion. The Reynolds
vs. United States decision is considered very dicey by legal scholars,
and very likely to be overturned by the Court as it is today, if Green
vs. Utah is accepted as a case.

This is an ugly business. Turley makes no mention of what I consider
the key issue: Evolutionary biologists tell us that homo sapiens
is in transit between a polygamous species and a monogamous species that
mates for life, and that there are powerful adaptive reasons for being
monogamous. Polygamy creates an unbalance in sexual pairings, with a small
group of dominant males guarding their harems against a much larger group
of unpartnered males, with violence a constant issue. When you're a primitive
primate with no weapons but your hands and teeth, well, that's bad. When
you're homo sapiens with a semiautomatic pistol in each pocket,
that's real bad.

We've been trying hard for 50,000 years to breed war-lust out of the
human species. Polygamy basically reinforces it. It's interesting to note
that Harold Bloom, in his 1999 book The American Religion, predicts
that the Mormons will eventually get their wish to return to polygamy,
and (given their astonishing rate of growth, through both birth and conversion)
by 2100 America will become a Mormon nation, with tens of millions of
unpartnered males ready to go to war against, well, anything they can
find to go to war against. Bloom pits them against the Muslim Arabs, but
stopping there is naive. My reading of history suggests that polygamous
societies project their constant internal warfare between alpha males
and unpartnered males onto the rest of the world. Want a good solid nightmare?
Imagine a first-world polygamous society with high-tech industry, nuclear
weapons, and endless millions of angry, expendable foot soldiers. We're
beyond "bad" here. (Lest people think I'm singling out the Mormons,
I should point out that there are fervent polygamy advocates among both
Christian and Jewish
fringe groups. Also, current mainstream Mormon thought is against polygamy.
Green of Green vs. Utah is on the Mormon fringe.)

Perhaps the scariest part of all is that Turley may be right. Our constitution
may not in fact allow for the forbidding of practices with provable religious
provenance. Polygamy is right there in the Old Testament, and practiced
in many parts of the world today. Given the current "anything goes"
climate in family law, could we pass a consitutional amendment fobidding
polygamy? I'm not so sure. Over the next couple of years, I suspect we'll
find out.

October 20, 2004:

I'm a little strapped for time today, but pertinent
to yesterday's entry, I'd like to point to Eric
Bowersox's nice update to my
original 1992 Jiminy concept piece, which was published on the late
and lamented END page in PC Techniques. I mentioned the jiminy
here in Contra in my February
26, 2002 entry, and in another
END piece that was a fragment of an SF novel I started and abandoned
in the early-mid 1980s. (I actually got the idea for the jiminy earlier
than that, at the Clarion SF writers' workshop I attended in 1973.)

One interesting application for a jiminy is something I didn't think
of in 1992: It could take continuous video of whatever is in front of
it in a five-minute loop. If you witness an accident, your jiminy witnessed
it too, or if anything else really interesting happens, you just say "vidstop!"
and the loop stops where it is, saving the last five minutes of video.
There are 1 GB Flash memory chips now (they're just going into production
and they're still pretty expensive) but in a few years there will be the
memory equivalent of a current DVD (4.7 GB) in something the size of an
Ultra, or smaller. (Think of what that'll do for "America's Funniest
Home Videos"!)

The key feature of a jiminy is that it doesn't even try to have a display.
(The Ultra doesn't even need as much display as it hasI'd be happy
with just enough screen for a single name/address/phone block.) You keep
a matching mini-tablet in your briefcase for when you need it, and the
jiminy talks to the tablet via Bluetooth or by just plugging it into a
USB port on the top of the tablet.

It'll all happen, and the nice part is, it won't even be that long.

October 19, 2004:

I
don't know if this is a trend yet, but in recent weeks I've begun stumbling
across a new family of gadgetry: Flash drives that do more than just store
data. The
Ultra (left) is the most elaborate one that I've seen, but there are
others, most containing only a simple MP3 player. Ultra also has a voice
recorder, an FM radio tuner, and (peculiar though it seems in a device
with so little I/O) a full email client capable of both POP and SMTP.

I have long wanted a small digital voice recorder for various reasons,
primarily to record speeches that I give. I'd be powerfully tempted by
something like this, especially since they appear to be planning data
capacities up to 1 GB. Although not a wireless device, it occurs to me
that every flash drive has some sort of cap over the USB data connector.
How about creating a (slightly larger) cap containing either a Bluetooth
or Wi-Fi wireless module? Cap on, it's wireless. Cap off, it's a USB Flash
drive. I'd buy that in a second, even if it cost more than a quarter.

This is yet another stop along the road to
what I call a "jiminy," basically a wearable computer that
sits in your pocket or on your lapel (or lives in your earrings) and talks
to you. (Listens, too, and that's really the hard part.) PDAs are still
inextricably linked to conventional textual I/O, and that damned screen
is a huge piece of real estate and a tremendous power drain. What could
we do if we decided at the outset to limit a computer's I/O to audio? I
think more than might seem possible on the surface. I've even given some
thought to an all-audio twitch game that could run on any audio player with
the minimal MP3 player controls. With good stereo headphones, sound can
take on a certain 3-D sense. How about a sort of pong game that you play
simply by listening? Could a sufficiently brilliant game hacker render a
simple 3-D space using echoes? Things like thatwe won't know until
we try.

October 18, 2004:

Many of my readers are high-tech geeks, and
outsourcing is one of those things that comes real close to home for people
who read ContraPositive. David Beers almost out-contrarianed me by making
a good argument that we may be facing too few skilled workers in
the computer fields in a few years, especially if publicity of current
trends causes universities and community colleges to shrink computer science
and other IT-related curricula. There are certainly education as well
as business cycles, and I'm not sure what's to be done about it. ("Be
good at everything," is how one person put it, which really means,
learn how to teach yourself and never stop.)

But all this led me to an insight that what may really be in jeopardy
is the very idea of a "job" as we now understand it. Employers
want a completely fluid labor market to minimize labor costs. They want
skilled people when they need them, and then when they no longer need
them, they want to be rid of them without repercussions. Under current
labor law, this is mostly impossible. Even in "at will" states,
lawyers can press "wrongful discharge" suits with almost no
basis, and in many cases a lawyer will call an employer on behalf of a
recently fired employee, with veiled threats of such a suit and an offer
that a certain dollar settlement will make the whole thing go away. After
an employer has had to face down a bit of that attempted extortion (we
had two cases that I know of at Coriolis) he becomes extremely reluctant
to hire more people. Europe has certainly taught us that the harder governments
make it to fire or lay off employees, the fewer employees will be hired.
Outsourcing is the result. Sooner or later most of us will be independent
contractors, or temps hired through job shops.

Outsourcing will increasingly become the norm, but it won't always be
overseas outsourcing. A couple of years back Shell Oil outsourced all
its fuel truck drivers to local job shops, forcing huge pay cuts and benefit
losses on the drivers. The Coriolis Group began as a book packager, which
is a company that creates books and then sells them to publishers, which
get them into the retail channel. Big publishers have used book packagers
for over 20 years to respond to increased demand without having to hire
additional staff. For young and flexible individuals, such arrangements
may be a great opportunity. (Keith and I built a thriving business by
helping big New York houses like John Wiley outsource editorial and production
work.) For older workers with families and mortgages, it makes life much
more difficult. (This is why employers also like young, unmarried workers
and will do almost anything to avoid hiring the middle aged.)

In the future, almost any job except executive and "relationship"
jobs will likely be outsourced. Relationships are hard to outsource, because
they are focused on a person and not a company. The opportunity here is
plain: If a small firm can make it cheaper (or at least easier) to outsource
work to Goodland, Kansas than Mumbai, jobs will remain in the United States.
If Congress could face down the trial lawyers sufficiently to make employment
lawsuits against small companies difficult or impossible, we could save
huge numbers of American jobs. New types of employer-worker relationships
will arise, and like it or not, we will move to some sort of government-controlled
single-payer health insurance system. (The tipping point on that issue
is 50%. Once half of Americans no longer have private health insurance,
the game is over, and we're heading there in a big hurry.)

The answer to outsourcing isn't training half so much as flexibility in
work arrangements. Job shops don't necessarily have to be sweatshops. The
guys who rule the future will be the guys who figure out how to make job
shops work.

October 17, 2004:

Today's Sunday paper here had a big front-page
story on (yet again) how much trouble the Episcopal Church of the United
States is in, over the consecration of an actively gay bishop in Vermont.
Leaving aside the theological issues for now, there are some nuances about
the threat to the organization itself that just don't come across in newspaper
journalism.

The Episcopal Church has a unique (and many call peculiar) system of
governance: It's a democracy, in which bishops, clergy, and laypeople
all have a say in Church policy. It didn't come to a decision on gay clergy
out of the blue. The issue was discussed for more than a decade, and no
vote was taken until all voices had had a chance to be (elaborately) heard.
Conservatives argued against. Liberals argued for. Last year, the vote
was taken, and the conservatives lost. The Church's mechanisms for resolving
disputes worked as they were designed.

This hasn't always been the case. On July 29, 1974, eleven women "stepped
forward" in Philadelphia during an ordination ceremony and received
the sacrament of Holy Orders as priests in the Episcopal Church. This
happened outside of the Episcopal Church's established procedures, and
conservatives within the Church went absolutely ballistic. The Church's
1976 General Convention both ratified the ordination of women clergy and
also updated the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer, giving it a more liberal
slant than the previous revision, which had been in use since 1928. The
Church boiled with the dual controversy for several years, and between
1976 and 1980, a fair number of conservative priests and a couple of bishops
broke with the Episcopal Church and formed independent dioceses under
the umbrella moniker of "Continuing Anglicanism." This was the
only significant schism ever suffered by the Episcopal Church, which has
been in existence since 1789.

The Continuing Anglicans strove to "continue" the Episcopal
Church as it had been for decades, using the older BCP and unrevised rituals.
Carol and I visited a number of Continuing Anglican parishes in the midlate
1990s, and while the worship was very Catholic and quite reverent, their
problem was obvious: Even though we were in our mid-40s at the time, we
were always the youngest people in attendance, sometimes by a decade or
more. Although the Continuing
Anglicans are still around, they're not growing much, and when the
old folks with the money are gone, I suspect the churches will be too.

I think that both sides in the current controversy have studied the Continuing
Anglican schism, and both sides are anxious to avoid making the same mistakes.
The Episcopalian organization is giving the conservative faction every
opportunity to be heard and is scrupulously sticking to its democratic
procedures. The conservatives seem to recognize that breaking loose isn't
a victory, especially since they can't take the church buildings with
them. So they continue to make noise from inside, withhold money from
the national organization, and pretend to be persecuted. (The notion of
mainstream Episcopalians persecuting anyone is a pretty silly idea;
at worst, the local conservative rabble rouser here in the Springs is
referred to in private conversation as "our village idiot" and
everyone is giving him a wide berth.) The bad manners and obsessiveness
of some local conservative clergy is even driving some conservative laypeople
out of their parishes; I spoke with one woman who told me, "I don't
support gay clergy, but you know, I'm just sick and tired of hearing about
it every Sunday."

In truth, the only really principled thing the conservative clergy can do
is break with the Episcopal Church and go off on their own. (I've heard
that they're unwilling to do so in large part because they'd lose their
church pensions, which casts further doubt on their commitment to their
own theology.) Whether a Christian church body should ordain gay clergy,
and whether a Christian church body should debate theology in a democratic
fashion are separate issues. What people need to understand is that the
Episcopal Church responded to a crisis by being true to its own established
principles of governance. In a very real sense, the "crisis" is
past. What remains to be done is healing the damage. Time will do that,
as it did for the damage caused by the 1974 crisis involving women's ordination.
The conservatives are mostly elderly; the liberal are mostly young. You
don't need a crystal ball to get a sense for which way it will ultimately
go.

October 16, 2004:

Michael Covington has written a
nice entry in his diary about Amazon's Marketplace program as a means
of selling off your excess books or even self-publishing your own. I
wrote about this as well, back in the fall of 2002 when I was thinning
out the bookpile in preparation for moving it here. It worked beautifully
for me: I
made almost $700 in a couple of months, and the major burden was standing
in line at the post office to mail product to the customers.

So this would be a good time to repeat an idea I had back in 2002: Amazon
should create a special program allowing authors to sell signed copies
of their books through something like Amazon Marketplace. In other words,
where an author wants to sell his or her books direct, Amazon should put
a link on the book's catalog page, saying, "Buy a signed copy from
the author!" The link would take the customer to a special Web page
with a note from the author, allowing the customer to complete the sale
in the Amazon Marketplace manner.

Not all publishers like the idea; many seem to think that would make
the author a competitor to retail stores or the publisher itself, blah
blah. Nonsense. Publishers should be delighted to cooperate with a program
like that. They should be willing to sell books to the author at print
costperhaps giving the author a carton or two up front, for freefor
these reasons:

Authors get less and less money from their contracts as time goes
on, as competitive pressures force cover prices down and royalty rates
down. Eventually, the better authors will decide it's not worth their
time to write good books. Many have already done this, and I sympathize.
A system like this, handled well, would allow authors to supplement
what the publisher pays them, without costing the publisher much at
all.

It would be a great way to help the author build a fan community,
which is a potent engine for building word of mouth and encouraging
reviews.

It would allow authors to promote their other books, by tossing a
catalog in the box before shipping the book to a customer.

Books are surprisingly cheap to print these days. A modest-sized book
without a CD bound in doesn't have to cost much more than $3 per copy
in a typical press run. If the author sells 100 books and clears (after
Amazon's comission) $15 each, in a sense, the publisher is paying the
author $1500 while costing the publisher only $300 to do so. Or, if the
publisher is stingy and charges the author print cost for the books, the
author gains $1200 and the publisher loses nothing.

Sales made through the author are not necessarily sales lost to the publisher,
because signed copies are a good that isn't sold elsewhere, typically.
What sales might be scavenged from conventional retail channels should
be considered the cost of keeping the author happy and in the businessand
as you can see, those costs are not especially large, in the context of
book publishing.

I suggested this to Amazon in a letter in 2002, and didn't hear back from
them. It's probably time to send them a tickler, heh.

October 15, 2004:

Several people sent me a link to a
piece in USA Today (which got huge exposure by being
aggregated on Slashdot) arguing that the American citizen computer programmer
is about to become extinct. Hundreds of thousands of programming jobs
have been sent overseas (primarily to India) in recent years, at the same
time that businesses are clamoring for more H-1B visas to bring in programmers
from elsewhere in the world, claiming that there is a high-tech labor
shortage here. The tech industry is coming back to some extent, and 27,000
new programming jobs have been created since 2001, but in that same time
period, 180,000 H-1B workers have been allowed into the country. Whatever
safeguards were built into the H-1B program are simply being ignored by
businesses, and winked at by the Republican administration, which claims
to have too much to do fighting terrorism.

That this is appalling is obvious, and there is seething resentment over
this in most quarters. Neither party has said anything about immigration,
however, and their hesitation is understandable: In an electorate almost
evenly divided, neither side can afford to alienate American Hispanics,
who automatically assume that "immigration reform" means "get
rid of all those Mexicans!" Besides, immigrants generally gravitate
to the Democratic party, which most resembles the socialist-leaning governments
elsewhere in the world, and provide cheap labor, which business owners
(who are almost exclusively Republican) will all but kill for. So there's
plenty of reason to keep quiet on both sides.

It's still pretty pointless to try and call the election, though others
are trying hard. Sly Stallone's mother, who is a dog psychic (meaning she
communicates mentally with dogs) claims
that Bush will win by 15 points. Laugh if you will (I am) but ya gotta
admit, her puppies have a pretty good record. I'm intrigued by the
conversion of soccer moms to "security moms," especially after
the school attack in Beslan, Russia some time back. If this
woman is characteristic, the Democrats should be messing their pants
about now. They may be balanced by moderate Republicans switching to the
Democrats over the War, but then again, there are many American Jews, historically
liberal, who are disgusted with the Democrats' calculated indifference to
American anti-Semitism, especially on college campuses. Like I said, calling
it is impossible, as a lot of pieces in the middle are jittering around
in a kind of electoral Brownian motion. I'm leaning toward Kerry, but those
psychic dogs really give me paws...er, pause.

October 14, 2004:

I was downstairs last night working on yet another
melamine board shelf project when Oldies 99 played the old Dire Straits
standard, "Money for Nothing." I flashed on my days as Technical
Editor of PC Tech Journal, which was one of the best jobs I ever
had, short though it was.

PC Tech Journal has mostly been forgotten, but it was the seminal
PC technology magazine of its era (1983-89) and I was there in its glory
years of 1985-1986. One serious challenge at the magazine was managing
the skidloads of "review product" we received, sometimes by
request but generally out of the blue. Stuff showed up every day, hardware
and software both, and by 1985 we had a full time person doing nothing
but logging it, shelving it, and sending it back.

Playing with the stuff was fun, and got weird at times. We received a
product called "Hell of a Shell," which was full of tongue-in-cheek
references to demonology, and a cutting edge screamer AT-compatible from
Dell (running at a mind-numbing 12 MHz) that literally caught fire on
my desk and set off the office smoke alarms. Microsoft sent each member
of the technical staff a huge box containing one each of everything Microsoft
sold at the time, with notes telling us that they were ours to keep.

It was an enviable position to be in, and we weren't even the kings of
that particular hill. We hung out a lot with the gang at PC Magazine
up in New York, and the stuff they got for review was almost beyond belief.
Sometime in 1986 I felt moved to writen a filk about it, which I reproduce
here pretty much from memory, as I don't think I still have a printed
copy:

(I want my...I want my...I want my own AT....)
Lookit them yoyos! That's the way you do it:
You edit magazines for old ZD.
No, that ain't workin'; that's the way you do it:
Get your programs for nuthin'; get your chips for free.

That ain't workin'; that's the way you do it.
Lemme tell ya now, those guys ain't dumb:
Maybe get some blisters on your typing fingers;
Maybe read bad English till you head gets numb, but
They get to install Microsoft Windows
Ahead of product delivery!
They get to test those accelerators;
They all get copies of Superkey!

I shoulda learned to hack in Turbo;
I shoulda made that hard disk hum.
Lookit that Fastie, he's got RAM leakin' out the keyboard,
Man! I wish I had some!
And hey! What's that? Machine-gun noises!
That's Duntemann banging wrinkles from "The State of C".
No, that ain't workin'; that's the way you do it:
Get your programs for nuthin'; get your chips for free!

Some notes, since we're looking back almost 20 years here: Will Fastie
was the founder and Editor in Chief. "The State of C" was a
major article we did every couple of years, comparing C compilers and
charting the progress of compiler technology. "Accelerators"
were these hardware kluges sold to goose the clock speed of PC and AT
processors, sometimes into double digits. Superkey was a keyboard macro
product sold by Borland, and "Turbo" was what a lot of people
called Turbo Pascal, when that was the only Turbo compiler there was.

(And yes, I did have a stanza that paralleled the one beginning "The
little faggot with the earring and the makeup" but it was more than
a little cruel, and I won't reproduce it here. Shall we say I didn't like
copy protection then, and I still don't like it. Those who were there might
guess who I was roasting.)

October 13, 2004:

It's all too easy to get complacent, comfortable
with your own software (see my entry for October
4, 2004) and thus get left behind as technology marches on. So I'm
goading myself to learn some new things (new for me, at least) which for
this round includes PHP and MySQL, which are frequently used together
for Web-presented server-side programming. I know SQL, of course, but
I've never really done anything with a Web-based database. It's time.

So I went looking for some good books on the topic. I went up to the
big Borders at Chapel Hills Mall and spent some time in their stacks,
flipping through many books and putting them all back. My discontent?
No overview. When I want to learn a new technology, the first thing
I look for is a conceptual discussion of the technology, its pieces (which
are often legion, in more than one sense) and how they all fit together.
I am appalled at how thoroughly this obvious element is missing from modern
tutorials. I have the same problems with shrinkwrapped software, which
for the most part doesn't have manuals worth a damn anymore. Windows Help
is, by culture, topic-constrained. You can put an overview in a help file
if you want, but most companies don't. It's just not part of the culture
of modern software.

One of the reasons that my book Assembly Language Step By Step
has been so popular for so long is that the whole first half of the book
is overview. I get letters almost daily from people who tell me that they
never knew where to start in understanding the x86 processorand
that my book finally showed them "the front door." My fear is
that overview will become so rare that people won't know that it's missing,
and thus won't appreciate books (which I could write, heh) that emphasize
overview as a way of finding "the front door."

I ended up buying several books on PHP, none with anything like a decent
overview. I'll figure it out by main force and screwing around, but one
or two chapters by a person who knows how overview works (there is such
a thing as bad overview, which is often worse than none at all) could
save a tech-savvy newcomer to a field weeks of dead-end threading and
trial-and-error.

Hmmm. Maybe I should write a book called Finding the Front Door: Overviews
of 13 Key Technologies. Certainly the industry needs such a book, whether
they know it or not. We'll see.

October 12, 2004:

A few odd lots on a crisp autumn morning:

Several people asked where to get the cookie arrangements that I menioned
in my October 6, 2004 entry. The company is
Cookies By Design, which
has franchises in many major cities. They have all kinds of different
designs; in fact, the computer designs are a very small part of then
lineup, which is mostly based on birthdays, holidays, pop culture characters
(think Garfield) and so on.

Apparently, fish opera (see my October 9, 2006
entry) is not a phenomenon limited to Colorado Springs. It's national,
even global, and
has been studied by a
university research project. The variety of fish emblems is dizzying.
Bruce Baker sent me this
one. Klaus Bruhn saw one in Florida recently with "gefilte"
inside the fish. Others mix
metaphors freely, and place "Tao" or "Islam"
(!!) inside the fish. Of course, many of us see no conflict between
Darwin and Jesus. I feel that evolution is the hand of God at work,
in this, the Eighth Day of Creation, which will last until the stars
go out.

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal pointed out that John Kerry
and his wife paid an aggregate rate of 12.7% on their taxes last year.
George and Laura Bush, whose income is less than one tenth that of the
Kerrys, paid a rate of about 30%. Typical Americans pay about 20%. A
flat tax of 18%-20% would thus raise taxes hugely on the very rich while
not changing things much at all for typical Americans. This might not
be a bad thing, though I'm not expecting Kerry or any other Democrats
(who are abjectly dependent on heavily sheltered old money) to even
bring it up in a hypothetical (and now increasingly likely) Kerry administration.

I'm researching "ghosting" as a means of recovering from
malware attacks. Norton Ghost 2003 is what I'm playing with, but it
still seems a little complex for nontechnical people. With the huge
(and mostly wasted) mega hard drives now shipping with new PCs, it would
be very useful to have a preinstalled utility that stored an image of
a "clean" main partition (including Windows and perhaps the
major apps like an office suite, Web browser, and email client) in a
separate partition, ready to be whisked in once the working partition
got dead, slow, or flaky from malware or "Windows entropy"
gunk. If you've used anything that does this and yet is simple enough
for nontechnical users, drop me a note.

October 11, 2004:

How's
Jeff's House Coming?

Our
landscaping was finally completed about the same time as I finished my
book, and yesterday I got out there at last to take a few shots to post
here. Our Colorado house project, which has taken most of our free time,
energy, and attention for almost two years, is now finished. It was difficult
because of the position of the house on the side of a fairly steep hill,
and there was a lot of hauling-in-and-arranging-of-boulders, tons of granite
gravel to shovel around the house, sandstone pavers, pine mulch, and over
a hundred plants to position. Carol ran herself ragged supervising, but
the results have been pretty spectacular. We have no lawn to water or
mow (a really big plus along the water-starved Front Range) and all the
plants are semiarid and grow well on a stingy drip system. (The lawn you
see in the very front of the photo is actually on the neighbor's side
of the property line.)

I've posted several large-format photos in the left margin. Because the
landscaping exists on so many different levels, it's hard to capture just
how much was done. We had a stone slab stairway built down from street
level on the south side of the house, and there are several terrace-like
levels set into the hillside, where we'll have some sizeable plants in
a couple of years, once everything matures.

A big "whew!" on this one. Now I have a shop to play in, and Carol
has a garden to play in. We haven't played much these last couple of years.
It's well past time to get down to it.

October 10, 2004:

I
haven't really had a workshop worthy of the name for almost two years,
since I started throwing everything in boxes back in October 2002. So
it was with considerable delight that I recently sat down, designed, and
built something significant for my new shop: A low, sturdy rolling cart
with shelves, to hold transformers (on the shelves) and my sheet metal
shear (on top.) The transformers will keep the cart stable while I cut
aluminum sheet or printed circuit board stock with the shear. The whole
assembly is low enough to roll under my 16-foot main bench downstairs,
out of the way until I need it againand if I need some additional
(if low) work surface, I can just put the shear somewhere else for a bit.

The
design required some thought. I wanted to build it without cutting any
melamine board (coarse particle board with a white plastic coating) myself,
since cutting melamine board with a smallish circular saw is a ratty process,
rich with chips spit in your face and raggedy edges. Home Depot will cut
lumber purchased there, and I designed it so that the cart proper was
made with three 2' X 4' melamine slabs, and only four straight cuts, none
of which I made myself. (Well, OKI cut a piece of scrap melamine
in half to make the shelves. Five cuts.)

The most interesting part of the process was applying iron-on melamine
edging with an old steam iron that Carol had given me after it sprung
a leak. It took some practice (and a little ripping-off of crooked edging)
but in the end it made the cart look like something I'd bought at Copenhagen
rather than threw together in the basement in a couple of hours. Building
something felt good. Learning something new while I built something felt
wonderful.

Having a split shop (heavy equipment in the garage, electronics downstairs)
has proven to be an interesting (and expensive) challenge. More on that
process as it happens. I'm only just getting underway.

October 9, 2004:

Mix your symbols carefully. Here in Colorado
Springs, where the poles of atheism and Evangelical fervor have never
been farther apart, we have what I've begun to call "fish opera."
Most people have seen the little fish symbols indicating Christian affiliation,
often on the bumper of the guy ahead of you in traffic. Perhaps to be
sure that nobody fails to get the message, some people have begun displaying
fish symbols with "Jesus" written inside them. Not to be outdone,
the atheists have created a fish symbol with legs, and "Darwin"
written inside. The Christians struck back with a larger fish symbol with
a wide-open mouth, and pasted it to the right of one of the atheists'
Darwin leggyfish. None of this is especially new, and most people have
seen them on one bumper or another.

But
I saw a new one a while back that is kind of unfortunate. I've sketched
it at left. It's the conventional Christian fish, but with the Cross where
the fish would have an eye. I know what they're getting at, but I have
to assume that the artist who drew this one had never spent much time
watching cartoons, in which a cross where an eye should be (in ancient
cartoon grammar) means "dead."

The early Christians (who knew what the Fish meant and felt no need to amplify
the point) got it right the first time.

October 7, 2004:

Had
an idea this morning: Tack or glue passive RFID
tags to trees to mark trails in forests and other hiking areas. They'd
have to be fairly close together (within 25-30 feet) and within ten feet
of the walking path, but they're so small they wouldn't stand out visibly,
as a spray-painted blaze would be. Passive RFID tags require no power supply
(they pong using energy scavenged from a ping) and once embedded in an epoxy
"dot" would not be an environmental hazard. The tag would know
the trail's name, and could announce branches and forks and possibly even
cautions ("Code 192: Steep upward slope ahead") that could be
interpreted and displayedor even spokenby an RFID-enabled PDA
running appropriate software. The data stored in the RFID tag would be multiple
keys into a PDA-hosted database, as you only get 96 bits with current tags,
though that will doubtless increase as the technology matures.

It would be cool to walk a trail with your PDA on your belt, periodically
reassuring you that you're still on Trail 209, and informing you that Trail
211 branches off in five more markers. I haven't seen anybody suggest this,
but it's an obvious use of the technology, and if it hasn't been suggested
before, I hereby post this as prior art to foil the patent scammers.

October 6, 2004:

This
is too wild. My co-workers at Paraglyph sent me the arrangement shown
at left, as thanks for finishing Degunking Email, Spam, and Viruses
more or less on schedulethough I topped the target set-pages length
by 50 pages. The book has set a Paraglyph record for retail pre-orders
("laydown") and the press run will thus be a record (for us)
12,000 copies.

The basket contains a dozen cookies decorated to look like high-tech
implements, including five PCs, three mice, two CD-ROMs, a PDA, and a
cell phone. All of the cookies are on sticks, which made the basketing
a lot easier, I'm surebut you can also eat them off the stick as
though they were corn dogs or lollipops. (Two are gone already.)

In the meantime, I'm furiously working through my do-it list, and also forcing
myself to learn some brand new things, which for this run include PHP (now
that my ISP supports it) and .NET. Oh, the delight of having time to read
again!

October 5, 2004:

A few more odd lots to help clear out the notes
file:

As most of you probably already know, Scaled
Composites' SpaceShip One won the $10M Ansari
X Prize by making a second suborbital flight to space (at least
100 klicks) within two weeks. There's been a lot of grumbling about
how useless such suborbital "pop-ups" are, compared to true
orbital flight, but I think people forget that we had to jump start
privately funded space travel somehow, and this was a jack-fine way
to do it. Most people were of the mindset that only governments can
muster the brains and funds to reach space, an error that government
did not try very hard to dispel. It may take another ten years, but
I suspect there will be another prize (please let's not call it the
Y-Prize!) for manned orbital launch and return, and another winner.

Six months or so ago I began a Web page focused on 12V "hybrid"
or "space charge" tubes, but had to set it aside when I began
writing Degunking Email, Spam, and Viruses. I finally sat down
and finished it a few days ago, and you can find it here.
If anybody out there has been doing things with 12V tubes and wants
to share the knowledge, I'd love to add your insights or circuits.

I found a nice little open source puzzle game by Keith Frampton called
Twin Distress, and I recommend
it to those of you who like puzzle games. I've sort of topped out on
Snood, (can't get my score in the Evil level any higher) and have been
looking for something similar. I use puzzle games to clean my mental
palate when I switch from one project to another in a workday, just
as the Japanese use a small bowl of white rice to clean their oral palates
between courses in a big meal. It works.

October 4, 2004:

I had an interesting insight today: I realized
that I like my software, even though a lot of it is now five or
six years old. And that's interesting all by itself. There was a day when
we couldn't wait to get the latest releases of our favorite packages
(we damned near went nuts waiting for Turbo Pascal 4.0!) because each
release was significantly better than the one before. As years passed,
the incremental improvement in major packages got thinner and thinner,
and at some point, a lot of us simply lost interest and stopped upgrading.
I'm still using Windows 2000, Office 2000, Visio 2000, Delphi 6, Dreamweaver
3, Norton Anti-Virus 2001, and InDesign 1.5. None of that stuff is bleeding
edge, which is goodI don't like to bleed. In mulling it over,
I had these thoughts:

Older software runs noticeably faster on newer hardware. I can't wait
to see what a 3.2 GHz 1 GB box does for poky InDesign.

Older software tends not to be targeted as much by black hats. The
JPG exploit I mentioned in yesterday's entry does not afflict any of
my (now ancient) Microsoft software. Of course, old versions of IE are
just as wormy as newer oneswhich is why I use Firefox.

Windows XP is bloated, slow, and is constantly trying to go out on
the Internet for who knows what. It doesn't give me anything I don't
already have in Win2K other than some eye candy and really clumsy wireless
support. I have to ask Microsoft for permission to use it, even after
I paid for it. XP SP2 breaks about half
the software in the known universe, and exists solely to cover Microsoft's
ass. No thanks.

Newer software seems to be more and more hostile to the people who
buy it. All the major vendors now have product activation, and one wonders
what else is hidden down there with the activation code.

This last point is interesting indeed. It's not just new software. New
printers and scanners are building Digimarc's
watermark detection technology into their hardware, nominally to prevent
counterfeiting. If you try to copy one of the new 20s or 50s on a Digimarc-equipped
scanner or copier, the drivers will pop up a browser window taking you
to this site. Creepy, huh? (And
will it send a surreptitious message to the Secret Service too?) Will
it stop there? Or will Big Media buy laws requiring that our scanners
and copiers rat us out if we try to copy a page from a book? This is definitely
a trend in the wrong direction.

Yup, I like old software better. Fear not; I have three lab machines that
I use to stay on top of the industry (two of them running XP, one of which
will soon have SP2, for good or for bad) but the machine I actually use
to make a living runs the golden oldies, and probably always will.

October 3, 2004:

Cleaning out and catching up. Some odd lots
to get underway, here at the beginning of the first week of the rest of
my life:

Paul Sleigh from Down Under told me about a
lawsuit recently filed by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, who
(with Henry Lincoln) wrote Holy Blood, Holy Grail 20 years ago.
The lawsuit is against the publisher of The Da Vinci Code, which
Baigent and Leigh claim lifted their book almost whole and simply put
a fictional framework around it. As best I can tell (I haven't read
it cover-to-cover yet) that's true. However, is telling the same story
a different way a violation of copyright? I guess it doesn't matter;
we're talking about down-the-rabbit-hole stuff on either side of the
ramparts. It'll be interesting to see which way it goes.

Most people have by now heard of the new exploit (this time in the
GDI+ Windows graphics subsystem) allowing
code embedded in a JPG image file to run and have its way with the
PC. This little ugly is serious for a couple of reasons, first of which
is that it's the first threat to be packaged in a JPG image, and thus
most antivirus packages don't even look at JPG files. Also, it's not
cut-and-dried as to what apps are vulnerable, because any app that calls
gdiplus.dll can get stung, and I haven't yet seen a complete list. Needless
to say, all Microsoft
XP-era software does, including IE, the Outlooks, Visio, and Office.
(I'm staying with Win2K!!!) Best advice is not to open JPG image files
that come in via email, though my guess is that the pornsurfers are
going to be the ones really hammered by this thing.

Eric Bowersox from up in Denver clarified things about Gevalia Coffee
a little bit. (See my entry for September 24, 2004.) He thinks the coffee
is pretty good (and sent me a sample, which I'll try as soon as I get
a new coffee maker) but has some gripes about their business model,
which reminds me of the old book and record clubs of the 60s: You sign
up for a coffee subscription, and you get two pounds of coffee a month
until you tell them to stop. The problem, of course, is that it took
six months for Eric to get them to stop, and by then, he had an entire
broom closet full of coffee. Most people just give up and pay for whatever
was sent, whether they wanted it or not, which means that Gevalia ends
up selling a lot more coffee than they would on a piecemeal order. They're
also enthusiastic users of spam (got two more pitches for their coffee
sub today) and thus should be shunned.

Just when I was about to proclaim USB flash drives as the perfect
solution to removable storage, the cartridge I had my entire Degunking
book on glitched, and about a third of the data that was on it simply
vanished. I had it all backed up and lost nothing, but the event shook
my faith in the format. I suspect I'll keep using them, but I was hoping
for something with a better reliability record than those damned glitchaholic
Zip 250s.

October 2, 2004:

Our 28th wedding anniversary, which I note here
every year. This time, however, we're celebrating three things at once:

I finished my book, which I credit as the most difficult book of all
that I've written;

On almost the same day, the landscapers finished the landscaping around
our new house. The design and supervision were Carol's project, and
it was a tough one, as you'd know if you'd ever tried to landscape around
a house set into the side of a steep hill.

We have remained joyfully and enthusiastically married now for 28
years. I'm not sure if that was difficult or not. Yes, it was workbut
what isn't?

Perhaps our marriage doesn't seem difficult because the benefits have
so spectacularly outweighed the effort. Some people have said my writing
is "effortless," but that's putting it badly. Writing is hard
work, but if you can get into flow (read that guy with the unpronounceable,
yard-long name) the writing itself becomes so rewarding that the effort
vanishes into the noise. So it's been with our marriage: When we're in
flow with respect to one another (which is our supreme effort, and which
succeeds nearly all of the time) the work involved is just, well, not
worth thinking about.

We're about to head out for a nice dinner at the Stagecoach Inn in Manitou
Springs. Love is work, but love, absent selfishness, is also flow, and flow
is when we are most uniquely human. Strive for it, succeed, and don't sweat
the work.

October 1, 2004:

At the Chrome demo he gave at Panera Bread last
week (see my entry for September 30, 2004) Xavier Pacheco also demoed
the purely Web-based version of Outlook. (We meet at Panera because they
have good free Wi-Fi, which helps when playing with server-based applications.)
If your company is running the latest Exchange Server, you can basically
have Outlook as an ASP.NET app that runs purely in IE, and I was thunderstruck
at how closely it resembled the conventional Win32 Outlook. Having been
an Outlook user from 2000-2002 at work at Coriolis, I know the program
well, and if I don't like it it's because it's slow, unreliable, and,
well, dangerous. Nonetheless, the UI is beautifully designed, and
I miss it a little. (Poco Systems is trying to emulate Outlook with its
recent Barca
product, which I will probably migrate to once the V1.1 release happens.
1.0 is a bad number, heh.)

So
clearly, there's more (and better) to be done with an HTML presentation
layer than some of us expected. I wonder how much fooling around it took
to implement Outlook's UI in HTML. My guess is a lot. So that leads
me to some speculation: Could we use X? And if not, why not? I don't pretend
to be an expert, but there's a great little book called The
Joy of X by Niall Mansfield that taught me much of what I know.
The modern X Window system can act as the presentation layer for both
desktop apps and server apps, and our modern PCs have more than enough
cycles to handle the additional overhead. Why the obsession with Web browsers
and mostly brain-dead HTML?

My hunch (keeping in mind that I'm not a practitioner on the X side) is
that HTML is a little better and X Window a little worse than my perception.
I need to study ASP.NET a little more, but if any of you know of a site
that compares ASP and X, do send me a link.